What is it like to be a man. She/Her is on a journey. Sweaty and sturdy. Hands in hymnals… in legs… in love.

            She/Her is trying to re-learn how to worship. It came to him so easily when he was a little rabbit. When he knew what was true and good and held it very tightly in his core and then sent it through his eyes and up his long velvety ears and down to the tips of his toes. He wanted to be a priest when he grew up.

            But as he was growing, She/Her used to think his neighborhood priest was God.

            So maybe he actually wanted to be God.

            Or maybe he just wanted to be a man.

            His skin is rougher than it was before. His voice is deeper- just a bit. He is sweatier.  He is sturdier. He still cannot become a priest.

            She/Her is trying to re-learn how to worship

            A man once told him that sex with him was like worship. But as the months passed, the two of them abandoned religion. Clumsy. Sharp. She/her is trying to learn how to deal with inevitability of hurt like this.

Last summer he spent two-months dog-sitting for his neighbor Suzzanne. Who lived alone except for a wiry puppy she’d adopted in May.

            Suzanne was religious. A quaker. And on the fridge door she had a calendar. Printed January to December of the current year and each month was a photo of her dog that had died in 2003.

            She/her is trying not to make calendars out of his own dead dogs. Especially when he has new ones, that are living and breathing and begging him for food.

(Calendar that says I Loved this Dog More than You)

            What is it like to be a man. What is it like to worship.         

            What are the sins of an 8-year-old.

            Whenever he starts to lose religion, She/Her makes himself say 10 Hail Mary’s and 10 Our Father’s (DIY confession) and then thinks of doves. In particular mourning doves. And to be the most particular, the oldest Mourning dove ever recorded. A man. Light. Lilted. With porous bones and a blushed body that had been tagged in Georgia in 1968 and shot by other men (RABBIT HANDS HOLDING ROSARIES) (strong) (Powerful) in Florida in 1998.

            Most mourning doves don’t live to see their 1st birthday. There is too much disease. Too many predators. Too many storms that are just too strong. Summers that are too hot and winters too cold. Too.

Most Mourning doves don’t make it past girlhood.

Except for this dove.

A man.

Beautiful.

A miracle.

A man.

Thirty generations (or more) had passed him by.

At least two states.

She/Her often wonders, did he have a family? Did he have dead dogs? She/Her wonders if he knew he was a man? 

She/Her imagines that he was searching. Searching how to worship.

Why else would he fly so high. For so long.

 He thinks God must have let that little bird live. Let that little dove be a man for thirty years because he was holy. Holier than you who are listening. Holier than Me. Holier than She/Her.

She/Her is floating on a rickety raft built from patchwork promises of a predetermined future and an ill-fitting girlhood. He is searching for his dove. An OLD dove DEAD dove. His symbol of dry land to his aimless ark. She/Her wants to be the oldest living rabbit, no, the oldest living MAN. He Wants to go UP. He wants to meet the sun.